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Would you like use SalesForce CRM in your local language? Have you tried to look for your language but haven’t succeeded? Do you speak Swedish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Russian, Czech, Turkish, Indonesian, Romanian or Greek? Then you still have a chance, but you have to ask your administrator for a favour. 😉

SFDC doesn’t display (and allow) all available languages by default and if you speak one of the languages above, your administrator has to create a new service case for SalesForce team at first.

How to do it? After login into the CRM, just click on the “Help” link a then continue to “My Cases” tab, where you can check your existing services requests or create new ones. Then click on the button “Log Case” and fill the case details following the screenshot below.

After you save the case, you receive a confirmation e-mail with the case number and during next 24 hours is your custom language activated. Once it happens, another confirmation message lands in mailbox.

Did you know that you can use traffic lights to visualize the status of your customers, leads and opportunities in SalesForce? It’s even easier than you think, because you don’t need any programming skills, but only single formula field.

Let’s say that you want to evaluate the opportunity status based on the last activity date and display a green light if there was an activity during the last week, yellow light if the last one is from 7 to 14 days old and red for all others.

Sounds simple, huh? So let’s start… 🙂

Open the administration screen, choose the option Opportunity – Fields and create a new custom field with type Formula. On next screen fill in its name and select the return type Text.

Now comes the most creative part, because you have to write down the conditions for the traffic lights. Following code works fine:

It happens all the time – customer calls you because of some trivial matter (e.g. what’s the sum of his unpaid orders or how many escalated cases have violated the SLA) and you have to run through several CRM modules to give him a correct answer.

At first you open the account details, where you check his payment or SLA conditions, then you copy his name and move to reporting. There you have to find the correct report, paste account name and adjust filtering criteria.

Finally after three minutes of hard effort, you can tell the customer precise number. Because this scenario happens on daily basis, you’ve already got used to the constant interruptions and do not expect any improvements…

With Salesforce.com Instant Reporting you can completely avoid this process and run selected reports directly from account detail.

You simply navigate to the customer account, click the report link and the instant reporting overtakes filtering parameters (e.g. payment status, SLA conditions,…) from the account and displays report results.

On top of that you can use instant reporting for all SFDC objects, because it uses standard formula fields and it’s really easy to setup.

At first it is necessary to create the underlying report – in our case, because we want to display all escalated cases with SLA violation, we add filtering criteria SLA violation = Yes and Status = Escalated. Because we want to display the information only for one selected account, we also add another filter Account ID, keep it blank and save. Don’t be afraid that the report hasn’t returned any result – it’s because of the empty Account ID filter, which is necessary for proper function of instant reporting.

After that navigate to the account fields (Setup – Customize – Account – Fields) and create new one with type Formula. Fill in its name (e.g. Escalated cases with SLA violation), set its type to Text, insert following code and save:

HYPERLINK(“/00OA0000003jShP?pv0=” & Id , “see details”, “blank”)

The HYPERLINK specifies that a link to the report will be created, /00OA0000003jShP is the unique ID of the report, which you can copy from the URL after you run it. There you have to take care, because your report ID will be different from ours.

The ?pv0= means that you want to change the first filter parameter in report and Id represents the Account Id field, which you can get by clicking on the Insert field button.

Two remaining parameters are really simple – see details is the text that will be displayed as a link and blank opens the report in a new window.

Account page layout is then enhanced by a new fieldand after you click the link, the instant report with all adjusted filters is opened.

Caution!
After you test instant report links in sandbox and move them to production, you have to adjust the report ID in the formula field. The reason is that the report in sandbox has another ID (/00OA0000003jShP) than the one in production.

If you want to use more ad hoc filtering criterions, just add another & sign and don’t forget that the criteria numbering starts from zero (pv0 – first filter criteria, pv2 – third filter criteria) – e.g.